Radeon Users Receive 20-50% Performance Boost in Crysis 3 Remastered

Banner for the Crysis Remastered trilogy hotfix.
(Image credit: Crytek)

Crytek has released multiple updates for its Crysis Remastered trilogy, bringing about a number of fixes to each of the included games. In news shared via the game's subreddit, a new hotfix potentially sees a massive improvement in Radeon GPU performance.

Crytek announced that the latest update for Crysis 3 Remastered "Fixed a critical performance bug on AMD Cards." and that "AMD owners should see an increase in performance of about 20-50%" That is quite the performance boost for a post-release patch. It leads to interesting questions regarding what sort of prioritization was done to bug discovery and fixing - and on which platforms? It's particularly interesting considering that Crytek worked closely with NVIDIA in introducing their technologies - such as DLSS - to the Crysis Remastered package.

This means that NVIDIA users had a much better out-of-the-box experience than AMD. Besides being able to toggle DLSS for extra performance, they didn't have to contend with potentially 20-50% lower performance on their graphics cards irrespective of game settings. It becomes even more interesting when we consider how the Remastered Trilogy released on current-gen consoles as well - all sporting AMD Radeon graphics. There are no details as to what exactly was fixed, and Crytek's community and social media manager for Crysis also didn't elaborate on the bug. Crytek does however specify some of the improvements they've done to Crysis 3; for instance, Crytek elaborates they've "Fixed a DLSS issue in multi-sampled vegetation alpha test to improve grass movement when DLSS is enabled". They also go into detail on other fixes; in Crysis 2 Remastered, for instance, the patch notes read "Fixed a potential GPU memory leak that could occur when Ray Tracing is enabled. This resulted in performance issues being encountered after playing for extended periods of time." 

Crytek expects to release the next major update for the Crysis Remastered Trilogy in mid-November. 

Francisco Pires
Freelance News Writer

Francisco Pires is a freelance news writer for Tom's Hardware with a soft side for quantum computing.

  • -Fran-
    "We've managed to convince nVidia to allows to fix the generic coding paths used for AMD that don't work with their new GPU architectures, so they'll see their GPUs better utilized now instead of using basic drawcalls in the incorrect order overwhelming the hardware scheduler".

    I think I've translated their statement to a more accurate statement? xD

    Well, sarcasm and joking aside, it's good to see bugs of this type getting squashed. Free extra performance is always welcome, even if it's a tad late.

    Regards.
    Reply
  • Soaptrail
    Looks like this has that copy protection that can make games stutter. I wonder if that is was part of the problem.
    Reply
  • d0x360
    Yuka said:
    "We've managed to convince nVidia to allows to fix the generic coding paths used for AMD that don't work with their new GPU architectures, so they'll see their GPUs better utilized now instead of using basic drawcalls in the incorrect order overwhelming the hardware scheduler".

    I think I've translated their statement to a more accurate statement? xD

    Well, sarcasm and joking aside, it's good to see bugs of this type getting squashed. Free extra performance is always welcome, even if it's a tad late.

    Regards.

    Welcome to my book... You might have written that sarcastically but I wouldn't be shocked if it was done on purpose with the intent to quickly fix it but unfortunately said fix comes out after digital foundry has released their performance videos.

    Nothing would surprise me when it comes to nVidia. I mean damn... I remember back when they cheated Benchmarking software by secretly overclocking the core and memory when the drivers detected a benchmark running. They did it for like 3 years before getting caught and it was enough time for them to gain a decent lead in sales over ATI despite ATI cards being on par or better in normal gaming use.

    Then after they were caught they started working on gameworks. A suite of visual effects designed to run very good on their hardware and very badly on ATI/AMD hardware.

    In fact the "fine wine" effect actually comes from and AMD driver team writing the code for an equivalent visual effect (like HBAO+) and then instead of running the gameworks shader it would inject the AMD alternative (which was open source) which usually looked identical or sometimes better and also ran significantly better. Generally it took AMD a few weeks after a game release to do this which is why it seemed like performance got better with time despite no game updates.

    Witcher 3 is a fantastic example of nVidia being jerks. They knew GCN 3 wasn't great at tessellation so they set hair works on Geralt to run at 64x with an insane amount of MSAA applied after. If you forced 8x tessellation in the AMD cp the hair would look identical but you would gain like 20 fps.

    Look at the difference between hair works and tress-fx. AMD's solution is open source, looks significantly better and uses half the resources.

    Let's also not forget about the whole GTX 970 split VRAM debacle or nVidia being caught lowering performance on older cards via the drivers to try and get people to upgrade.

    So... Despite my last 3 gpus being nVidia (GTX 1080, RTX 2080ti ftw3 ultra, RTX 3080ti ftw3 ultra) I have no trust in them. I'm really hoping RDNA3 knocks it out of the park. They already beat nVidia in rasterization performance so all they need to do is add tensor cores or an FPGA to handle ray tracing and a temporal based ai using alternative to DLSS.

    FSR works the way it does because RDNA2 doesn't have the dedicated hardware for RT like the RTX series does but that's expected to change with RDNA3.

    The end..lol
    Reply
  • renz496
    Yuka said:
    "We've managed to convince nVidia to allows to fix the generic coding paths used for AMD that don't work with their new GPU architectures, so they'll see their GPUs better utilized now instead of using basic drawcalls in the incorrect order overwhelming the hardware scheduler".

    I think I've translated their statement to a more accurate statement? xD

    Well, sarcasm and joking aside, it's good to see bugs of this type getting squashed. Free extra performance is always welcome, even if it's a tad late.

    Regards.

    If there is any foul play we probably hear AMD talking about it right now. But i heard some people said AMD GPU especially from much more recent generation do have issues even on the original Crysis 3. And that is considering Crysis 3 is AMD Gaming Evolve title in the past.
    Reply